disagreement is the deterioration of trust. This, of course, can be particularly costly in a health care setting. But if what you're saying simply doesn't conform with a patient's understanding of the world or their own experience, at some point they begin to question your trustworthiness. People often try to overcome distrust by giving more and more evidence for their own point of view. But as we saw with Dr. Hagen and Michael, that can backfire. To overcome the decline in trust that often emerges in disagreement, you can try telling a story from your own experience that has led you to your current conclusions. In my lab, we have conducted a series of studies where we ask people to defend the same perspective with accurate, credible data or with a personal story from their own life. We saw repeatedly that people who share a story are seen as more trustworthy, even if their counterparts continue to disagree with them. Julia, this seems counter to the advice we often hear about using data and evidence to support a point. Is there a downside, especially if we want to increase public trust in science? Do we really want to go back to telling stories to convince patients that our recommendations are sound? So it turns out that you can easily combine both kinds of evidence. You can tell people about a story from your own life and also cite data. Adding the data doesn't seem to decrease the effectiveness of the story for producing trust. I'm also noticing that we are again not talking about persuasion as the ultimate goal. Instead, we're talking about preserving trust. Does storytelling make you more persuasive? In some studies, telling a story versus relying on data has been shown to be more persuasive and in some studies there's no difference. However, stories never seem to make you less persuasive and consistently improve trustworthiness. Importantly, however, there is an intimate relationship between trustworthiness and persuasion. It's awfully hard to persuade someone if they simply don't trust you. It strikes me that not every story would work equally well here. Does it have to be a particular kind of story? Yes. Ideally, you want a story about yourself, not about some other person, and a story that makes you seem a little vulnerable. For example, it might be a story about struggling with something as a young parent or as a young professional or when you yourself were nervous about undergoing a particular medical procedure. The key is that the story has to be personal and just a little bit self-revealing. Okay, so one of the things I'm noticing about this advice is that it again dovetails with our earlier conversation, which is the idea that in disagreement people are often trying to maintain authority or win. But the research shows that revealing a little vulnerability is actually good. It's a way to appear more receptive and reap all the associated benefits. Right, so what happens is that when you reveal something about a prior struggle, the listener is led to conclude that you're the kind of person that values honesty. Otherwise, why would you be revealing this potentially embarrassing thing about yourself? So, Julia, can you tell us about how the conversation between Michael and Dr. Hagen actually resolved? Yes, after Michael accused Dr. Hagen of trying to profit from promoting COVID vaccines, Dr. Hagen was really taken aback. She had no idea that anyone could think of her that way. One of the reasons I feel so strongly about the boosters is that my mother did not get boosted last fall and now she suffers from long COVID. This has been hard for her and also places incredible strain on my aging father. I just assumed my parents would have been aware of the importance of the boosters. Now I blame myself for not having an explicit and direct conversation with them about how important the shots were. Afterwards, Michael said that he was still skeptical of the value of the booster, but now he believed that Dr. Hagen was genuine in her advocacy. Since he was still concerned about the side effects, he and Dr. Hagen spent a couple of minutes talking about the timing of the shot so it might have minimal impact on his fishing plans. He left the office saying that he was seriously considerate. When Michael left, he thought that Dr. Hagen was really someone he could talk to. Her story about her parents made him recall taking care of his own family. Now he understood why Dr. Hagen felt strongly about boosters. you

disagreement

trust

healthcare settings

personal stories

data